SQL Server works just fine and has lots of concurrency control to do whatever they need. And the way they're using the database doesn't seem to really make this an issue outside of their replication.
> are really, really expensive
This whole janky setup they have sounds even worse. None of the commercial relational databases are really that expensive considering what they offer, and we're talking about Uber here. We're a small startup that pays for both.
Money for (a better) working product with support is the right call, not build it yourself. This is just poor tech decision (outside of using a RDBMS in the first place).
Those are all massive scale tech companies that actually needed to invent many of the datastore technologies used for big data today. Uber is not among them.
But I'm sure you know all this as it seems you work for an enterprise database company that actually makes the exact product Uber should use.
SQL Server works just fine and has lots of concurrency control to do whatever they need. And the way they're using the database doesn't seem to really make this an issue outside of their replication.
> are really, really expensive
This whole janky setup they have sounds even worse. None of the commercial relational databases are really that expensive considering what they offer, and we're talking about Uber here. We're a small startup that pays for both.
Money for (a better) working product with support is the right call, not build it yourself. This is just poor tech decision (outside of using a RDBMS in the first place).